


but i close my eyes and i'm somewhere else

by still_i_fall



Category: The Society (TV 2019)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Very fluffy, also, also peep the christmas tree farm lyric title, could not help myself, from la to new haven, i'll be the first to admit it, last minute travel buddies, lots of swearing, no New Ham au, oh my god this is such a mess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-27
Updated: 2019-12-27
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:06:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21984901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/still_i_fall/pseuds/still_i_fall
Summary: A list of people who notice how upset Allie is about the flight delay (and, in turn, ask her if she’d go for some shitty airport restaurant food). Spoiler alert, the list is quite short.1. Harry Bingham.“You want to grab something to eat, Pressman?”-or harry and allie as unexpected holiday season travel buddies
Relationships: Harry Bingham/Allie Pressman, Kelly Aldrich/Becca Gelb (mentioned)
Comments: 11
Kudos: 170





	but i close my eyes and i'm somewhere else

**Author's Note:**

> I currently have the flu. I've had it for the last few days, and according to the Internet it should be gone after about five days so hopefully I'll wake up tomorrow and feel as though I was never sick. 
> 
> The flu is not only my excuse as to why this is about two days late, but also my excuse as to why this is such a mess. It's a mess because I'm a mess and so by extension Allie is also a mess. Oops. 
> 
> Hopefully you all still like it regardless of how much of a mess it is. A bit of a spoiler, but I finally cracked and pretty much made a fic entirely out of lists (in the roughest of drafts, it was all lists. I got really tired of that about ten lists in, though). 
> 
> So here's my secret santa gift to the wonderful @kellyaldrich on tumblr! 
> 
> The title is from the wonderful Taylor Swift song 'Christmas Tree Farm.'
> 
> Happy Holidays!
> 
> (Also, this fic is sorta a continuation of 'you're my best friend (so we're dancing in this world alone)' this fic I wrote forever ago only it's how i think everything maybe would have gone if the whole school buses to some empty town thing never happened.)

Fresh out of law school, Allie is given two choices, New York or LA. In the end, she flips a coin, and when it lands on heads, she packs her bags and gets on the next cross country flight. 

(New York was heads but before she even flipped the coin she knew where she wanted to be.)

LA is bright and sunny and warm, and she really can’t imagine it going any other way. For the first time in her life, she’s wholly independent. She’s her own person who makes her own decisions, and maybe one of those decisions is booking a first class plane ticket. (Which she  _ earned _ by the way. Maybe Cassandra would call her wasteful, but Allie has worked too many long hours not to have earned it. She makes money, her own money, real money that deserves to be spent on something important. Allie’s comfort, the ability to get even the tiniest bit of sleep on a cross country flight and watch as many on demand movies as she wants, is something important.)

It’s been two years since she made the move, two years since she’s been back home. She’s tried, don’t get her wrong, to return to Conneticut for a little vacation, but fuck, working at a law firm, trying to get your foot in the door, is hard. A couple more years and she could be a junior partner. She’s not sure how willing she is to give that up. 

Only she hasn’t seen snow in forever. She hasn’t had an excuse to wear a puffer in forever. Maybe that’s not at the very top of her list of reasons why she  _ needs _ to go home (she is an adult now who makes pro con lists on a semi regular basis. The list of reasons may not be literal, but the thought is definitely there), but it’s pretty close.

So, yeah, she books her first class flight ticket, calls home, and checks the weather forecast.

  
  


* * *

  
  


**Three reasons why Allie moves to LA.**

  1. The weather. It’s always sunny. It’s pretty much perfect weather all year round. She loves it.
  2. The job offer. She’s nearly partner at the law firm. Just a year or two more. The pay, _oh my god the pay._ She doesn’t even know where to start with that. She almost takes a job in New York, is so incredibly close to accepting, but LA just calls out to her.
  3. Because it’s far from home. For the first time in her life, she feels fully independent. She feels like she’s not attached to Cassandra, like she’s doing her own thing in an entirely new way. People hear about Cass through her, not the other way around. She likes that. 



  
  


* * *

  
  


There’s less than a week until Christmas. LA traffic is as bad as ever. Allie wonders if West Ham is even worth it seeing as the drive to the airport will take about as long as the flight itself. (That’s an exaggeration. A very big exaggeration. She is really not in the mood for this shit. Fuck, she hates driving.)

On the way to the airport, she nearly gets into three different accidents. To her credit, only one is her fault (so what if she didn’t realise that there were no left turns from that lane. This is really LA’s fault for it’s stupid road signs and all the lines on the ground). 

And then, as soon as she’s at the airport, she can’t find any fucking parking. Yeah, you heard that right, no parking. Yet again, she wonders if West Ham is worth it.

As soon as she does find a spot and is mentally preparing herself to park, a long process that has, if anything, only becoming lengthier since she first moved to this god forsaken city with it’s lack of urban planning and parking spots that can properly fit a regularly sized car, a Maserati swoops in and steals it from her. She yells a few choice expletives rather loudly, thinks, only for a second though, about a boy from forever ago who drove a car that looked just like that, and then drives off at the speed of ten miles per hour because sometimes she’ll get flashbacks to all the accidents she’s gotten into in parking garages. 

After that ordeal, it takes her an additional ten minutes to find a spot.

  
  


* * *

  
  


**Four reasons why Allie can’t wait to be home for the holidays.**

  1. Snow. She misses snow so much more than she’d care to admit. The weather doesn’t change in LA, not in the way she’s used to. She wants to be able to go outside and be legitimately cold. She wants an excuse to wear a puffer rather than some stupid sweater that she has to take off midway through the day.
  2. Home. You know, that place where you grew up, the place with your family. The place where you know everything and everyone. It’s been three years, and sure, LA feels like home, but only in the simplest sense of the word. She wants to be _home._ She wants the house where she lived from ages zero to eighteen. She wants the bedroom with the One Direction poster, and all the mugs she couldn’t take with her when she moved. She wants to feel like a kid again.
  3. Food. No matter what she does, the food she makes never tastes quite like the stuff her mom made for her growing up. It annoys her to no end. Her mom likes to say that Allie only comes home for the food. It’s not entirely a lie.
  4. Family. Fuck, fine, she misses her family. For the entire first week of college, she’d call home every night and cry, that’s the kind of person Allie is. It takes her a hot second to adapt to change. For a week, just a week, she wants to feel like a kid again. That’s not too much to ask, right?



  
  


* * *

  
  


The airport itself is just as busy as it’s stupid parking garage. Suddenly, she’s very thankful she packed light because,  _ fuck that’s a long line to check a bag. _

She still has to wait longer than she’d like to print out her boarding pass at one of those little kiosks, and there’s a voice in her head that sounds eerily like her sister telling her that she really should have printed out the ticket at home (so what if Allie likes how the paper of the boarding passes printed at the airport feel. Fucking sue her).

As she rushes through the airport (which she really doesn’t need to do. She’s got over an hour before her flight even thinks about taking off), she bumps into three people. She apologises to two of them (since it was probably her fault), and flips off one person (because it was definitely not her fault and they should not be yelling those things at her; she is in a hurry. She has places to be) and all in all it’s not too bad of an experience. She’s definitely had worse times in airports.

And then she sees the security line. 

  
  


* * *

  
  


**A list of people Allie recognizes in the potentially hour long security line.**

  1. Harry fucking Bingham.



  
  


* * *

  
  


She’s just barely entered the line when she hears someone behind her gasp. She doesn’t think anything of it seeing as she practically gasped when she saw the line too (is West Ham really worth it?), only then the gasp turns into a surprised laugh and fuck, she recognises that laugh.

“Pressman?”

She turns around. It’s nine in the morning (has she mentioned that yet? Has she mentioned that she had to wake up at six thirty so she could finish packing and try to make it to her flight on time? West Ham is really not worth all of this. She does not want to see snow that bad), and there he is, her old chem partner, her sister's former rival, the one and only Harry Bingham.

Maybe she’s sleep deprived because she smiles at him (it’s been ten years since she’s seen him last. Fuck, that makes her feel old). “That’s me.”

“Haven’t seen you in forever.” He’s smiling at her too. She thinks again about the ten years bit. Is she really that old?

“It has been a really long time.”

“So what are you doing in LA, Pressman? Never really saw you as the California type.”

“That doesn’t sound like a compliment, Bingham.” 

He grins at her. It looks near identical to the one from ten years ago (she really needs to stop bringing the number into this. She is not in the mood to feel old). “You didn’t answer the question.”

“I work at a law firm downtown.” She says it casually. She tries really hard not to think about seven years of law school.

Harry looks a little surprised. “You’re a lawyer?” She nods. “Me too. I work at Cooley.” (Allie’d applied to Cooley. She had not gotten the job.)

“Arnold and Porter,” she supplies.

“Wow Pressman, you’re really in the big leagues, huh.”

She rolls her eyes at him (but is also smiling. She just can’t help it). “Could say the same for you.”

The line moves up a little bit. Somewhere in front of them, someone near them complains that it’ll be another half hour  _ at least. _

“So how are you?” he asks. She thinks about how much is appropriate, if she can mention a black maserati that looks too much like his own (fuck, was Harry the one who took her spot earlier. She wouldn’t put it past him. She wonders if it’s fair to him to turn around right now and ignore him for the rest of the time it takes to get through this horrible line), or how much she misses snow. This guy was almost her best friend once, way back when she was seventeen and the most rebellious thing she’d ever done was skip school to buy donuts with him in New Haven.

She decides only the bare minimum is appropriate. “I’m good. I’m really good. Tired, but I’ve been up since six so that’s kind of a given.”

He nods. “Me too. I’m excited to go back home.”

Allie smiles. “Oooh, good ol’ West Ham. I’m heading there too.”

They spend the rest of the half hour making only semi awkward small talk. At some point Harry mentions how much he misses snow and Allie nearly cries because  _ someone gets it. _ She blames the fact that she’s been up since six. (It’s been ten years and she thinks she might’ve missed him a bit.)

  
  


* * *

  
  


**Three things that go wrong once she’s out of that stupid security line (and away from Harry Bingham).**

  1. She nearly forgets her laptop in one of those containers and has to double back for it. She runs, properly runs and thanks all of the Christmas gods for the fact that it’s still there when she returns for it. (“I’ll never leave you again. I promise!”)
  2. She walks in the wrong direction while searching for her gate and ends up having to take twice as many steps as necessary which really shouldn’t be a big deal but she is really not in the mood for this shit.
  3. When she finally does get to her gate, her phone is about to die (she’d like to think that she charged it last night but she’s also pretty sure that she slept with it under her pillow just to be absolutely certain that the alarm she’d set would wake her up at six fucking thirty) and, get this, the only available seat with a plug in is next to the only and only Harry Bingham (she really needs to stop saying his full name like that. It’s getting weird). 



  
  


* * *

  
  


She sits down next to him. He smiles at her. Somewhere near them, a child cries. They both ignore it.

“Long time no see Bingham.”

He smiles at her. “Hey Pressman.” (She did not mention this earlier because she was trying desperatly hard to ignore it, but fuck, she’s really missed him calling her ‘Pressman.’)

“So I take it you’re flying United too.”

“What other airline would I fly?”

She laughs and makes a move to plug her phone in. He asks what her favorite part of being a lawyer is (like they’re interviewing one another). She answers, very sarcastically, “the paperwork,” and he snorts.

And then their flight gets delayed. Due to snow. Stupid fucking snow. She hates snow. She never wants to see snow again. (That’s not at all true.)

Allie nearly curses rather loudly but makes eye contact with a rather small child. She mutters her choice expletive under her breath. Harry laughs beside her.

This is not at all what she meant when she said she wanted snow. She wanted to see snow, not get stuck in the LA airport for another three hours because of it. She woke up at six thirty for this flight when she could’ve woken up at nine thirty. That’s three more hours of sleep she could have gotten. 

  
  


* * *

  
  


**Three possible things Allie could do to kill three very long hours.**

  1. Sit in this not very comfortable seat and charge her phone while watching whatever movie she has downloaded on her laptop. She doubts there’s all that much selection. That upsets her far more than she’d care to admit.
  2. Walk around the airport, lugging around her stupid carry on and even stupider purse, and rethink her Christmas gift to Cassandra. She’s pretty sure she saw a store that was selling neck pillows around here somewhere. She wonders if Cassandra has any travel sized neck pillows.
  3. Go to the nearest food kiosk and buy as much shitty airport food as possible. Maybe, if she’s feeling even more spendy, she’ll stop by a restaurant and order appetizers and wine. 



  
  


* * *

  
  


Beside her, Harry shifts. He’s packing up his stuff. Allie kind of stares at him (on accident, okay. She is very tired).

He laughs (a tad bit awkwardly). “You okay?”

She pulls a bit of an exaggerated smile. “Doing great actually. Very excited for all of this extra time I get to spend at the airport.” 

  
  


* * *

  
  


**A list of people who notice how upset Allie is about the flight delay (and, in turn, ask her if she’d go for some shitty airport restaurant food). Spoiler alert, the list is quite short.**

  1. Harry Bingham. 



“You want to grab something to eat, Pressman?”

  
  


* * *

  
  


She stares up at him. Harry’s already standing. Allie blinks. 

  
  


* * *

  
  


**A list of reasons why Allie accepts his offer.**

  1. She’s really got nothing better to do. 
  2. Fuck, she has nothing better to do.
  3. She really can’t come up with something better to do to save her life.



  
  


* * *

  
  


“Ummm, sure.” She sounds uncertain. “Sure, why not.”

And now Allie’s standing up with him, and he’s waiting for her while she’s gathers all of her stuff together into something she can pull around the airport easily and, fuck, why is there so much stuff in her carryon? Why did she not just check a bag? Why did she even decide she wanted to go home for the holidays?

“You want something sweet?” he asks, interrupting her very important inner monologue with one of the weirdest questions she’s ever been asked. 

Allie laughs because oh my god he sounds so stupid. The sound of his rollie bag against the floor sounds smarter than him. “What did you just ask?”

“Like donuts? I saw a shop earlier I think.”  _ (Her seventeen and him eighteen but only barely. She has a spanish test that she needs to be taking but here she is eating maple bars with bacon on top with Harry.) _

“Weird way to phrase it.”

He grins at her, bright and easy. “Answer the question, Pressman.”

She takes a moment. Their walk slows down just a little. She wonders how many long hours she has left at this stupid airport. “I think I want something salty.”

“Over donuts?” he asks slowly like he can’t believe her. This loser only eats maple bars with bacon on top. He should not be looking at her like she’s crazy for wanting salt; bacon has a lot of salt in it. He’s the crazy one.

She nods. “Yeah. I’m in the mood for sodium.” She regrets saying ‘sodium’ as soon as it comes out of her mouth. However, Allie’s said a lot of stupid shit in her life. In the grand scheme of things, ‘sodium’ isn’t too bad. Stupid? Yes. Embarrassing? Yes. But not all that bad.

Harry, of course, laughs at her. “You trying to throw me off with your big science-y words?” She’s having flashbacks to chemistry class. Fuck, that’s on her. Why did she ever think, even if it was only for a half a second, that sodium would be a funny thing to say?

“Obviously. College changed me.”

“Yale?” Harry asks. Allie nearly laughs out loud. Who does he think she is? Cassandra? 

“NYU and then Columbia Law, actually.” She corrects him lightly, as though she’s not trying to brag. (She’s very obviously trying to brag.)

“Harvard all seven years.” Fuck, he one upped her.

“That sounds tiring.”

“Not as tiring as I imagine New York was.”

She shrugs. “I think it prepared me for LA.”

Allie spots a pizza place. She really wants pizza. It doesn’t even have to be good pizza. Harry laughs when she tells him this. She wonders if the next three hours will really be that bad.

  
  


* * *

  
  


**Three things Harry convinces Allie not to buy for Cassandra after they finish eating really shitty LAX pizza.**

  1. A zebra print fuzzy blanket. Allie argues that it could be funny. Harry tells her it’s tacky and Cassandra would burn it. Allie tells him that the fumes could kill a person. He says that sometimes you have to make sacrifices to right the world’s wrongs.
  2. An alarm clock. She is very very close to buying it, only it’s over thirty dollars and Harry is telling her that no one wants an airport alarm clock. 
  3. A bucket hat. He laughs when he sees it. She does not take it as a sign that she should buy it for her rather serious very adult-y older sister.



  
  


* * *

  
  


She buys the bucket hat for him instead. They have less than a half hour before the flight is set to board. (If it’s delayed again, than that’s it, West Ham is cancelled.)

When she throws it at him and he puts it on his head, all casual like, she laughs rather loudly. 

“I’ve never wanted you more.”

He grins at her. Fuck, she’s really missed Bingham grins. “I’ll never take it off.”

There’s a moment of quiet (or as quiet as it gets at the LA airport around the holidays), and Allie wonders if they’re all talked out when Harry says, “Did you hear that Kelly and Becca are together?”

Allie grins at him but also squints at him like he’s an idiot. She does it simultaneously. It’s one of her talents. “Yeah. They’ve been together for forever.”

Harry rolls his eyes at her. “I know that.”

“They’re good together. They were at my going away party when I left for LA, and we’ll facetime sometimes.” It’s weird how long ago high school was.

“I saw them a couple of weeks ago. They kept making fun of me ‘cause I’m single.”

Allie let out an awkward laugh. What the fuck is he trying to tell her? Is Harry Bingham trying to flirt with her because she’s pretty sure the last time that happened was about ten years ago and she’s going to need him to be a lot less subtle. She is very confused and also very tired because six thirty (she will never stop mentioning that).

Finally, after what feels like a very long awkward moment that in reality was a very short only slightly awkward moment, Allie says, “I am too. They like to make fun of single people, Kelly and Becca.”

Harry looks a little bit relieved. She’s not quite sure what it means (or what she wants it to mean).

  
  


* * *

  
  


**A list of people or may or may not have had a sorta okay three hour flight delay.**

  1. Allie Pressman.
  2. Harry Bingham.



  
  


* * *

  
  


The flight attendent people are telling everyone to get ready to line up to board the plane. Allie and Harry both shift to gather there things. First Class boards first. When the flight attendent people (do they have a proper name? Flight attendant people is a little wordy) call for first class boarding, both of them stand. She’s not at all surprised that he has a First Class ticket. He looks a little surprised that she has one, though. Maybe that should be offensive, Allie’s not sure it is, though. 

He asks to look at her ticket. 

She makes a face at him. “Why Bingham, not sure it’s real?” 

He rolls his eyes at her. “I want to see where you’re sitting.”

She is, once again, rather confused. Her face most likely shows it. “Oh.” She hands him her ticket. The idea of him stealing it from her only crosses her mind for a half a second. That’d be so funny, Harry taking her plane ticket and running off with it. Just Harry running in general would be funny. “Why do you wanna know where I’m sitting?”

He ignores her question and grins down at there tickets. Allie stares at him.

“Harry, are we stuck sitting next to each other on this over five hour flight?”

“I wouldn’t say stuck, Pressman. You should see yourself as lucky.”

She really can’t shake this guy, can she?

  
  


* * *

  
  


**One kind of nice thing Harry does for Allie that he didn’t have to do but still did.**

  1. He puts her carryon in the overhead bin for her. Sure, he does complain the entire time (“What the fuck do you have in here?”), but it’s the thought that counts.



  
  


* * *

  
  


Four plus five is nine meaning nine fucking hours with Harry Bingham. She did not wake up at the way too early time of six thirty in the morning thinking to herself that this would be the day she’d catch up with her old chemistry partner/ almost best friend/ older sister’s arch nemesis. 

Allie’s very worried that they will grow sick of one another very quickly. 

They do not. 

“Wow Pressman, you’re indecisive,” Harry says after watching Allie click on four different films in the span of thirty seconds before choosing to not watch anyone of them. 

She makes a face at him. “Oh fuck you, Bingham, you’re watching a superhero movie.”

He pulls an exaggerated hurt look. “I’ll let you know this is an Iron Man movie.”

He’s paused it. She pulls out the one earbud she has in to look over at his screen. Fuck, she really liked those movies when she was younger. When did she get old? Was it when she started saying shit like “When I was younger” because she can stop doing that if it makes her young again.

“Cassandra likes Iron Man 2,” Allie tells him after a moment of staring at the tiny screen. 

“Is she insane?”

  
  


* * *

  
  


**A list of things Allie and Harry do during the flight.**

  1. Talk about Marvel movies like nerds. Allie admits to him that she still thinks Chris Evans is hot. Harry agrees with her.
  2. Share earbuds (even though Allie has her own as well as her own screen to watch movies on) so they can watch the movies together. They decide on Iron Man 3 and the Captain America movie that ScarJo stars in. 



  
  


* * *

  
  


By the time they land in Connecticut, it’s dark out. Captain America isn’t over yet, but they still turn it off. 

“Can you drive yet?” Harry asks. Ugh, she does not want to think about driving right now. Has she already mentioned she hates driving ‘cause oh my god Allie hates driving. LA has ruined whatever few nice things she ever thought about driving. LA took those things and stomped on them.

“Nope.”

Harry looks a little confused. Even when they were kids (because seventeen and eighteen is still kids), he didn’t understand the idea of not enjoying driving. “How’re you getting home?”

“A cab.”

He rolls his eyes at and makes a move to grab her luggage. She does not stop him. “That’s stupid.”

Allie ignores him. “Did you know that not all cabs are yellow?”

“I can give you a ride, Pressman. I mean, we’re pretty much going to the same place, and I’m already renting a car.”

She bites her lip and glances out the plane window. It’s snowing. Fuck, in just over an hour she’ll be in West Ham, she’ll be home. She asks herself  _ what’s another hour with Harry Bingham? _

“Okay. That’d be great.”

  
  


* * *

  
  


**Two things that happen on the drive from the airport to West Ham.**

  1. Harry’s rental car is a Corolla and he hates it. Every couple minutes he’ll complain about how it _won’t accelerate right._ Allie thinks it’s funny. 
  2. Allie starts to feel like she’s seventeen again, like she’s skipping school to buy donuts and fuck she doesn’t want to say she peaked in high school (because she did not peak in high school), but that was a really good day. (Why the fuck didn’t they keep in touch? Was it really that hard?)



  
  


* * *

  
  


They’re in her driveway. The car’s headlights on shining on her garage and Allie could’ve sworn she just saw her mom peak through the blinds. 

“When does your flight leave?” he asks her. 

She pulls out her phone to check. “Sunday at noon.”

Harry sighs rather dramatically. “Well I guess I’ll see you then, Pressman.” 

“I really just can’t shake you, Bingham.”

“Likewise.”

Allie laughs and Harry smiles, and fuck, she’s a little exited for the trip home.

  
  


* * *

  
  


**A very brief list of things that happens once they’re both back in LA.**

  1. Harry asks her to coffee. She accepts.



**Author's Note:**

> Hope you liked it! Please please please tell me what you think!


End file.
